White screen, apple logo, spinning wheel and no boot

Hey!! I am facing almost the same problem. I own a macbook air and when I turn it on, the start-up chime follows, then a white screen with the apple logo, a spinning wheel and a progress bar appear. Once the progress bar is a quarter loaded it disappears, the logo and spinning wheel remaining there for ages, not doing anything. I tried resetting PRAM, safe mode boot which won't work, forced it to turn off and on a number of times and still doesn't work. Should probably mentinon that this happened after i tried to update the software, which of course failed. up until that point it had trouble loading and the system kept freezing.I would be extremly grateful if you could help me..

4 Soluções

It sounds like one of those software updates was a firmware update that failed. Try booting to the original USB drive and see if it'll just start up ok. If it starts up just fine from that, then your problem is in your system, not hardware. If it does the same behavior, then it's probably firmware, & I think to correct a failed firmware update, you must be able to boot to an installed OS on a drive with the firmware updater on it, so this may require a trip to an Apple store to resolve.

I had the same problem with startup of my macbook air. I installed a usb modem, then i wanted to play a video which was on my computer and the system got frozen. I restarted the computer and end upwith an apple logo with the spinning wheel under it.

I didnt get a recovery CD or usb with my lap top. Had same startup problem sometimes with macbook pro, but then i could use the OSX DVD to restore.

Anyway i want to share my experience how i fixed it without losing any data on my computer.

Firstly i tried to do a safe mode startup, didnt work.

Secondly did a PRAM and SMC reset. Didn't have any success.

After the startup chime apple logo would be there then spinning wheel and so would stay for ages.

Finally I shut down my computer and started holding down Command + R keys till i got the utilities page. verified the HD report was HD seems to be ok.

On the right top side of the toolbar chose the wi-fi and connected it. Then did an online installation of Mountaion Lion again on my Macintosh HD. After installation I let it to restart automatically and voila! It worked ! It started in the same way as i left the desktop to restart.